Foolography Community

Hello, I saw the FAQ about connecting to an external GPS, quoted below:

CAN I CONNECT AN EXTERNAL GPS TO THE NEW UNLEASHED?

No. However, this might change in the future. The main reason why external GPS are not supported anymore is that the new Unleashed is using Bluetooth Low Energy and external GPS use Bluetooth Classic. So in case we (our you) find an external GPS supporting BLE we can check compatibility and try to make it work with the new Unleashed.

Can you clarify - is Bluetooth Low Energy completely incompatible with classic bluetooth devices, such as on the Bad Elf GPS PRO+, or is it just that the efficiency / range / whatever is not great?
If the latter, can you provide an option for those users that would like to use it that way, despite the shortcomings?

I ask because my external GPS can go well over a day without having to recharge, while my phone is lucky to get 8 hours, and much less if I am using the phone for things like navigation or music. For a long day of shooting (which often involves things like navigation, my phone will likely not last all day.)

If it's not possible, I guess I'll have to go back to the previous generation unleashed...

Couple of suggestions from another (soon-to-be) user.

If you're using your phone for navigation in the car, get a charging lead for it for in the car. For use out an about, get a small high-capacity battery pack, and a suitable cable. You can get surprisingly high capacity ones that are surprisingly compact for surprisingly little money.

Hi allanimal,

Unfortunately, the Unleashed can simply not communicate with Bluetooth Classic (<2.1) devices. As explained in the FAQ, if you know of an external GPS receiver out there in the market that supports Bluetooth Low Energy (>4.0), we could probably make the Unleashed compatible with it via a firmware update.

Andy,
Long long ago when I purchased this it was said that it would work with an external GPS. I purchased my Bad Elf GPS Pro for use with this. It's long since past the point where I can return it.

One should make it work as sold. If it doesn't work with the external GPS I would say that we have additional false advertising. (Just like the ship dates).

-Jason

Hi Jason,

if you have any problems with your purchase please send an email to support@foolography.com. I'm afraid I can't help you here.

Hi Allan and Jason,

a little more info on the subject:
As Andy said, we cannot directly connect from the new Unleashed (BLE only) to the Bad Elf GPS Pro (Bluetooth Classic only), since these two Bluetooth standards are simply incompatible.

However, since you can pair the Bad Elf GPS Pro (and Pro+) with your phone to provide a more precise location to the phone, and the Unleashed in turn uses the Phone's location, The Unleashed will therefore use the the more precise location of the Bad Elf! So in that way you can use the Bad Elfs with you Unleashed. This should also help with the battery use of your phone while navigating, btw!

There are a few external GPS devices with BLE out there, but unfortunately, their protocols are not open, so we will need to reverse engineer those to make them compatible with the Unleashed. We will look into this, and try to find worthy GPS devices. If you have any suggestions, make sure they have Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth 4.0, 4.1. 4.2 or 5, and let us know! We'll check them out! And if you have contacts to the Garmin developer team, you're welcome to put us in touch ;-)

And yes, we tried convincing Bad Elf to make a BLE version of their great GPS devices, so far they have not agreed yet, but maybe if you all write to them too... ;-)

We did not mean to mislead you, sorry if you misunderstood it that way. If you would have asked, we could have told you that the GPS Pro was not going to be compatible.

I suggest you try it with the phone's location though! They have come a long way! And even with GPS on, but the app in the background, there is hardly any additional power usage! The heavy drain on the battery you might be used to from using the phone for navigation comes mainly from the display staying on for an extended period of time, not from the phone calculating the GPS position!

I hope this helps!

Oliver

This is from the Indigo "Story":
"The Unleashed can use your smartphone’s location or a Bluetooth GPS receiver for direct geotagging. The exact GPS location of where you take the photo is saved in its metadata immediately. Relive your vacation by viewing your photos on a map. Or find pictures of your favorite spots by simply zooming in on their location, without having to remember exactly when you were there. Almost every photo management software already supports geotagging."

My phone is supports Bluetooth low energy and the Bad Elf. In any case my Iphone is my work phone and it's battery life is horrific nor do I want to trek with it. My Android has a good battery life but the app doesn't work well with the N2. I would like to use the Bluetooth GPS receiver that I purchased for this.

That said are you going to start making the 09's again. I would purchase one today from https://www.bhphotovideo.com/ if they said that they had it in stock. I would have been much happier if I didn't wait for this and purchased the 09's when I first looked at your products.

-Jason

Hi All

As a very happy user of the Unleashed Dx000 i was really exited to participate in the new unleashed on Kickstarter.
I have a D500 for a while now and have been using SnapBridge for geotagging which does work wel as long as you have the program running (just like the new Unleashed) but i must say both are far from reliable as the previous Unleashed.
So for me also External GPS is very important and it would be really helpful if we can have the external GPS feature back on the new unleashed even when it means i have to look for a BLE GPS receiver.

We have ordered the first BLE GPS receiver to start testing with! Lets see how that goes ;-)

Oliver wrote: ↑

November 9th, 2018, 12:02 am

We have ordered the first BLE GPS receiver to start testing with! Lets see how that goes ;-)

To fill in the gap can you have B&H stock at least one 09 version (If the pricing is close to what this one is I will order it):
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?N ... yes&sts=ps

They have the version that they have in stock won't work on my D750.

Thanks -Jason